Frequently asked questions

o11yparadise is a vendor-neutral observability publication. It collects stories of observability done right, each ending with the practice that made it possible, and publishes Beyond the Dashboard, a technical series on the engineering behind reliable systems. The name uses o11y, the common numeronym for observability (o, eleven letters, y).

Yes, in spirit. Where o11yhorrors collects the outages and nightmares, o11yparadise collects the calm: the incident caught early, the alert that fired exactly right, the quiet on-call week. Both are true, and both teach. One shows you what to avoid, the other shows you what to aim for.

Stories describe engineering experiences, with service names, company names, and identifying details changed or removed. Each story carries a label (firsthand, anonymized, composite, or illustrative) once the editors have confirmed where it came from. Beyond the Dashboard episodes say in the text when an example is constructed or reproduced in a lab rather than taken from production.

Yes. Use the share page to send your story. Every submission is read by a human before anything is published. Nothing goes live automatically, and you choose what name to publish under, including staying anonymous.

Only what you choose. You can submit under a handle, a generic role like SRE, payments, or no name at all. We recommend leaving out real company names, customer data, and anything that could identify a specific person.

The best stories are specific and honest. They describe the setup, what you did right, the moment it paid off, and the practice behind it. A clear, repeatable practice is what turns a happy ending into something the next engineer can actually use.

o11y is shorthand for observability. The 11 stands for the eleven letters between the o and the y, the same way i18n stands for internationalization and k8s for Kubernetes.

A submitted story is delivered privately for review and opened as a proposed change to the site. A maintainer reads it, edits lightly if needed, and approves it. Once approved, the story joins the collection for everyone to read.

Chaitanya Sistla is the editor of o11yparadise and the author of Beyond the Dashboard. Chaitanya Sistla works as a Principal Solutions Architect at OpenObserve, which builds observability software; that affiliation is disclosed on his author page and on his articles. The publication covers practices and tools on their merits, whichever stack you run.

Nothing. The Paradise Index runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to or stored on our servers. Your latest result is saved only in your own browser, so you can see your progress next time, and “Clear my answers” removes it. When you share a result, the answers travel inside the link, image, or report you share, so anyone with that link can see them. There is no account and no database.

Beyond the Dashboard is the o11yparadise technical series. Each episode follows a problem past the graphs: the signal, the investigation with logs, metrics, and traces, the engineering decision, and the lessons. Episodes say in the text when an example is constructed rather than taken from production.